“Make progress among the willing.” The Good, Bad, and Ugly of #PIF24

I’ve been to a lot of industry conferences throughout my career, including organizing and hosting quite a few myself, so I have a lot of opinions on what makes a good one. I’m happy to say the inaugural Publishing Innovation Forum fully met my expectations as a potential successor to the original Digital Book World — for better and worse.

While the program and speakers are typically the highlights of most conferences, and the attendees and networking opportunities are often the difference between a good and bad experience, I want to call out two underrated logistical aspects that Firebrand nailed in Nashville: scheduling and coffee.

The main program featured a nice mix of general and breakout sessions over two days (I didn’t attend the third day, which was more of a user group conference for Firebrand customers), including the oft-overlooked final general session that brings everyone back together to share takeaways and feedback rather than ending with breakouts, or putting a single speaker on the spot to hold everyone’s attention. It reinforces the sense of community, enabling everyone to have a chance to make final connections instead of slipping out early for their flights back home or sightseeing activities.

The scheduling masterstroke, though, was starting the second day an hour later, ensuring the night owls could get a little extra sleep, or someone like me could get a morning run in without having to wake up super early.

The other nice touch was having coffee available all day rather than squeezing it into scheduled blocks designed to force attendees to engage with sponsors. The downside, unfortunately, is I drank way too much coffee!

The Good

I’ve presented at some events where the rest of the program wasn’t terribly appealing and skipped sessions or entire blocks to get work done (or do some sightseeing), but that wasn’t the case here. Only one general session and one breakout slot lacked any notable appeal for me, but I still found something useful in attending both because even bad sessions offer learning opportunities. I also saw plenty of other speakers in the audience for sessions they weren’t part of, which is always a good sign of a well-curated program and roster of speakers.

Michael Tamblyn‘s opening keynote, “I Choose Enthusiasm,” set the perfect tone for the conference, full of the unusually candid (but always cagey) insights and pragmatic optimism he’s known for bringing to every speaking appearance. Between noting that disruption and publishing were like hurricanes and Florida, and predicting that “AI becomes the Drop Shadow of writing,” he gave some interesting background on Kobo’s journey to becoming a major ebook player everywhere except in the US where they always assumed Amazon would win, and so focused their efforts elsewhere.

“We can win by caring about reading” is definitely not something you’d hear from Jeff Bezos nor Andy Jassy — and if you did, you absolutely wouldn’t believe they meant it — but it ended up being a recurring theme throughout the conference.

The first breakout sessions found me choosing Brian O’Leary‘s “Building a Supply Chain for the Next Generation of Book Publishing,” which offered a great overview of major industry challenges and how BISG is trying to tackle them.

Among the various issues he noted, the one that resonated the most with me was the need for “metadata repositories of record,” because it’s one of the biggest challenges I deal with at the day job. Having a single source for every publisher’s up-to-date metadata in a standardized format would improve my work life immensely, not to mention create more opportunities to develop better discovery tools that would benefit all publishers. (A payments clearinghouse would be huge, too, but that’s getting way too inside baseball for this little blog.)

O’Leary also delivered my favorite quote of the conference, piggybacking on Tamblyn’s pragmatism: “Make progress among the willing.” Editorializing a bit, he was making a call for everyone to stop using Amazon (and/or the Big 5) as an excuse not to change the way things are done, and I’d argue that this conference itself was an example of that.

After lunch, I attended what turned out to be one of the best marketing panels I’ve been to in years, “Book Marketing at Any Budget,” led by Mad Cave’s Allison Marie Pond, which was full of practical insights from a range of perspectives, including a rare Big 5 appearance and a tiny independent publisher. They broke down and discussed almost every critical aspect of marketing, including specific callouts for libraries and backlist, offering clear examples for each. The only thing they didn’t cover was owned media, which remains most traditional publishers’ biggest weakness, although Pond briefly noted Mad Cave’s website and email newsletter when asked at the end.

(Pond and Mad Cave were also notable for being a rare example of comics publishing being represented at non-comics industry conferences, and Tokyopop was also in the mix.)

Andy Hunter was the closing keynote, interviewed by NetGalley’s Lindsey Lochner, who did a great job of guiding him through an authentic and insightful conversation about Bookshop.org’s value to indie bookstores and the publishing ecosystem overall. I was very skeptical of Bookshop when it launched in 2020 (and for a while thereafter), but between the perfect timing of the pandemic creating a need for their service, and Hunter’s own distinct brand of optimism for books and book people, I believe they’ve solidified their place as a critical part of the industry’s online infrastructure.

He also confirmed that their plan to sell ebooks is still on track (led by Ami Greko, whose hire fully changed my opinion on their potential impact), along with a surprise announcement that they’re also working on building their own e-reading device, which seems simultaneously ridiculous and necessary if they’re going to have a chance of making a real impact.

Day Two opened with one of my favorite people in the industry, ABRAMS’ Mary McAveney, discussing a wide range of topics with another favorite, Firebrand’s CEO, Angela Bole. It’s been fascinating to see how ABRAMS has slowly evolved under her leadership, and to recognize some things Open Road was known for starting to peek through.

Echoing O’Leary’s supply chain challenges, she noted how difficult changing antiquated but deeply entrenched systems can be, and when asked (by me, during the Q&A) what the easiest and toughest things to transfer over from ORIM were, she unsurprisingly said Amazon advertising and data analytics, respectively. Nevertheless, in addition to various structural changes that had already been announced, she mentioned that ABRAMS is establishing a division dedicated solely to backlist, straight out of the ORIM playbook despite not yet having the ideal technology foundation for it.

The last breakout session of the day was my own panel, “Partnering with Public Libraries: Acquisitions, Discovery, and Reader Engagement,” where I was joined by Nashville Public Library’s Noel Rutherford and Elizabeth Atack. We were up against an AI breakout session (more on that below) and only had ~20 attendees in the room, but looking to make progress among the willing, we got right into it. Our slides are embedded below, and I recorded the audio (which I hope to make available somewhere soon), but I think it was a solid, insightful conversation that even I learned a few things from.

For anyone who knows me personally, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that someone angrily walked out of the session, but you’d probably be surprised that they were mad at librarians rather than me! It was a perfect storm of “A comment more than a question…” and an incredible sense of entitlement, but also a reminder that you have to listen to what people are actually saying before launching into your predetermined agenda.

The most interesting takeaway for me was how much public librarians rely on three major distributors (Ingram and Baker & Taylor for print; OverDrive for ebooks), and how frustrated they generally are with different aspects of those relationships. I’ve given a version of this presentation several times in recent years, in full or in parts, and I always stress how difficult it can be to engage librarians — but it was invaluable hearing directly from two librarians sharing their own experiences and perspectives.

The Bad

This was my first big in-person conference (as opposed to a trade show) since the implosion of Twitter, and I took a lot of sloppily handwritten notes rather than live-posting like I (and many others) used to do. It was an interesting shift that I’m still wrapping my head around, and partly why this post is longer than it probably should be because I’m mainly transferring and contextualizing my notes for my own benefit and like three other people who were interested and couldn’t attend. Other than a few posts on LinkedIn, I have no idea if this conference had any notable impact beyond those of us who were there, and because nothing was officially recorded, any long-term impact will likely be muted.

The biggest logistical complaint I had was the lack of mics in the breakout rooms, meaning some speakers were barely audible to many attendees at any given time. Not everyone is comfortable raising their voice beyond natural levels, and not everyone has the same hearing capacity, particularly in rooms with bad acoustics. No mics is almost always an expense decision, but it should be considered table stakes for accessibility as sacrificing an equitable experience just to save some money is always a bad decision, especially if you’re trying to engage and nurture a community in the 21st century.

I don’t want to single out individual presenters, but I was particularly disappointed in one marketing session that dedicated half of its time to inspirational vibes, offering no numbers or metrics to make the ideas actionable, and unable to even answer any questions about those ideas. Never mind that the audience definitely wasn’t operating with marketing budgets that could afford to implement any of them even if they’d performed even reasonably well. There was also an Ignite presentation that lazily used the “change” theme to deliver an uninspired sales pitch for their services that paled in comparison to the others, which I found particularly insulting since I opted not to participate because I didn’t have the time to put together a worthwhile presentation.

The Ugly

Because AI is like a disease-riddled mosquito that finds its way through every crevice, it was well represented on the program, albeit mostly in skippable breakout sessions. Unfortunately, one of the keynote slots was dedicated to it, and rather than offering up anything of substance in that 45-minute block, it ended up just being a long-winded teaser (including a revisionist history of enhanced ebooks, and a tortured use of GDP that didn’t acknowledge GDP is a fake metric) for the next day’s breakout session — the exact one my session (and one on audiobooks, which are kind of a big deal, too) was scheduled against.

It also bled into other keynotes as a topic of conversation, so Tamblyn, Hunter, and McAveney all had to talk about it, too.

Tamblyn voluntarily offered “AI as Shitty Literary Photoshop” in his enthusiastic presentation, while Hunter confirmed that all of Bookshop’s recommendations are from humans, noting that he’s “interested in institutional practices that support human beings.” McAveney’s “embrace and shape it” approach is a pragmatic one, balanced by her belief that you “build technology from the bottom up,” rather than the top-down approach most companies seem to be taking with it.

Outside of some mundane time-saving examples related to non-creative tasks, I remain unimpressed and unconvinced by the AI in Publishing hype train, and I wish organizers would establish firmer expectations for concrete examples before platforming consultants and vendors claiming it’s the next big thing.

The Takeaways

Overall, I left Nashville energized, which is ultimately the highest compliment I can pay any event. I’m glad I attended the conference, meeting some new and interesting people while reconnecting with others I hadn’t seen in years. I also picked up some useful insights that I’ll take back to the day job, and others that will refine my thoughts on the industry in general.

In particular, I got a very clear message that intermediaries need to do a better job of facilitating communications and transparency between publishers, booksellers, and librarians. It was also another excellent reminder that the industry is so much bigger than Amazon and the Big 5, and if we prioritize making progress among the willing, we can disrupt the industry for the better — from within.

I really hope Firebrand’s experience was a net positive, and that they commit not only to making it an annual event, but also find ways to keep the community they convened in Nashville connected between each event, not just to nurture the conversations and connections that started there, but to expand them even further. I’ve been a fan of theirs from back in my DBW days, and I can’t think of a better potential steward for a new community platform that builds upon what DBW once established, starting with pieces they already have in play, including the BookSmarts podcast, the Metadata Minute newsletter, and the robust community they’ve already built around NetGalley.

PS: Special shoutout to Joshua Tallent, another DBW era colleague I remain a big fan of (he even helped me out years ago on a self-publishing project), whose fingerprints were all over the program, and whose presence was felt throughout the conference, even when he wasn’t on stage. Conferences are always a huge group effort, but the best ones often have a couple of critical players on the programming side who define its focus and voice, and I’m pretty sure Tallent deserves a lot of credit for that.

Written by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is the Chief Content Officer for LibraryPass, and former publisher & marketing director for Writer’s Digest. Previously, he was also project lead for the Panorama Project; director, content strategy & audience development for Library Journal & School Library Journal; and founding director of programming & business development for the original Digital Book World.

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